Rule

I would say it's "fewer" not "less", but every time I do, I get a lecture and downvoted.
Even though this time it's quite clearly a case where "fewer" is the proper choice as "cop" is most definitely a countable noun (yes, I know there are exceptions, this is generally not one.)
Bring on the downvotes.
I agree with the sentiment.
- Literal grammar police.
  ACAB.
  
  The thin red line
- You wanted a lecture, here you go:
  You can use less for countable nouns, any of them. We've been doing it for literally centuries. In fact, it has never been used only for uncountable nouns (unlike fewer, which has generally only been used for countable nouns). Correct language is determined by what native speakers use on purpose, not what a textbook or teacher says.
  At least read the Wikipedia and the dictionary if you want to keep a strong opinion about this:
  However, modern linguistics has shown that idiomatic past and current usage consists of the word less with both countable nouns and uncountable nouns so that the traditional rule for the use of the word fewer stands, but not the traditional rule for the use of the word less. As Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage explains, "Less refers to quantity or amount among things that are measured and to number among things that are counted.”
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fewer_versus_less
  
  OK, so I'm a prescriptivist and don't agree. As mentioned in the paragraph before the one you quoted. Should we just let any old thing that slips into common usage to become the norm? Why not spell it "definately"? It's very common and everyone understands it.
  I'm all for evolving language, but the fewer words we use, the less elegant it becomes. IMO of course.
- Hey man, do you want to be grammatically correct, or do you want to speak clearly to people who want to be a cop? Sometimes you have to make a choice.
  
  Haha! Fair enough.
- Less cops --> Fewer racism
  
  Less cops
  Fewer racism
  Very better society
  Wow!
- no downvotes on blahaj
- You can count numbers but they use < in maths. QED.
  
  Oh, you mean the "fewer than" symbol? (Some people do call it that.)
  
  You can count numbers? How many are there?
- You can't be downvoted because this is on blåhaj.
  
  Does lol have downvoting? Because, for some weird federation thing, I can definitely downvote and see others having been downvoted if their instance allows downvotes. Here, have a downvote. :D
- Well when you have 81,000 gallons of cops you need less cops for sure. I think the sign is right.
  
  I can't tell if you made this example randomly, or were actually present for the last discussion of this exact same thing. Either way, it's pretty funny. How many gallons in your average cop? They look pretty voluminous in general.

Fewer.
- Recently I've started to think that these and other similar battles are lost.
  
  It just feels so petty. Not a single person reading "less cops" was confused by its meaning. I get fighting against misuse of your/you're, its/it's, etc. because they can make things harder to read. Fewer and less, though, have the exact same underlying meaning (a reduction).
  
  This one isn't even real. "Fewer" can only refer to countable things, but "less" can refer to both countable and uncountable things, and has been used that way for hundreds of years. It has never been wrong to say "less."
  
  They aren't "lost", because they were never yours to be "fighting" in the first place..
  
  I’m a grammar loving curmudgeon. Even I check myself more often than not after I realized the kind of classist tones that come through when arguing against lexicon.
  
  Me trying to get people to say they "are doing well" not "doing good" when asked "how are you doing?"
  
  Language prescriptivism is a useless endeavour, let the language evolve as it wants, I personally don't mind the use of less in this situation
- I actually kind of disagree in this context. Less is sharper and more readable while conveying the same meaning. The grammar books might say it’s technically incorrect, but I think it was the right word to use here.
- Ahh, I went on a rant about this, and someone already did it for me much more concisely.
  
  Yeah, they used less words
- Why?
  
  https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/fewer-vs-less
  Essentially, fewer is normally used for discrete numbers of things (e.g. "fewer apples", "fewer boats", or "fewer cops") while less is used for amounts (e.g. "less water", "less sand", or "less money").
  As noted in the above link, there are exceptions. However, the exceptions listed are all with "than" or "or" added. Specifically, it's pointing put that while "fewer items" is correct, "3 items or less" is also considered correct.
  In the case of the sign, it is referring to the specific number of officers in the city, so it should use "fewer". Does it matter? No, not really. Why did I bother saying anything? I got a chance to rep grammar and quote Stannis Baratheon at the same time.

100% funded by the fire department lmao
- Actually? Because good! Cops try and act like they're an emergency service, like they're first responders, when they're not. So it's good to hear some firies and ambos pushing back against that, all too often cops buddy up to them.
  
  Don't know if it was, but firemen tend to dislike police. I am also getting the idea EMT are getting to that point now. Close friends of the family have been in both of these fields for a long time. They, and all their friends, from their prospective work, feel derision for police. The firemen openly mocked them as long as I knew them, and the EMTs have been getting less, and less, friendly with the police in the last decade.
  
  Only in america, cops would not be regarded AS first responders lmaoo
  
  is ambo actually a thing people say? that’s so funny
- Nobody wrote a song called Fuck the Fire Department. Except this guy. And it's amazing.

Apparently an unpopular take, but wouldn't the world (or at least, this country...) be a better place if the folks who became cops were the type of people who were also considering being a librarian?
Basically it seems like the ACAB mindset is in part self-fulfilling: "cops are bastards , I'm not a bastard, therefore I won't be a cop." Ok, so now some bastard who is less qualified than you becomes a cop, with no competition from you.
I get that the institution of policing in this country is deeply flawed; but is what we're currently doing really working?
Maybe a progressive, grass roots "infiltration" of the police is doomed to fail, I dunno. But I'm not sure we'll ever find out.
- Good people who become cops get bullied into either becoming bad cops or leaving (or worse)
- YouTube content creator and ex-police officer That Dang Dad notes that it's not just the current killology-riddled precinct culture in which every civilian is a potential threat that drives pro-escalation attitudes in law enforcement, but also a degree of combat PTSD, as police are directedmto where social trouble spots occur, and have to deal with the potential of violence even when all the people in a situation are polite.
  That Dang Dad quit law enforcement before coming to terms with how it affected his brain. He is a total police abolitionist now, saying not only that police officers are driven by the culture to be cold and cruel but also by the work to be afraid of everything, that danger might come from anywhere at any moment.
  These days, we know the police are not here to protect the public, rather to serve as an occupying garrison for the ownership class, and while this was always the case, the DEA and war on drugs and the 1033 program have made this role even more clear. But it also means we're not going to get a public serving response service until we are no longer occupied by the ownership class.
  
  Funny you mention PTSD.
  There's practically a direct pipeline from military to police.
  Really gotta wonder how much current police behavior is manifesting from combat related PTSD.
  
  These days, we know the police are not here to protect the public, rather to serve as an occupying garrison for the ownership class, and while this was always the case, the DEA and war on drugs and the 1033 program have made this role even more clear.
  American police. Police in different countries are structured in very different ways.
- The story I've heard is "What does a 'good cop' get for sticking their neck out for what is right?" "Fired."
  I agree with your sentiment though. I don't know how to fix it, but we need an overhaul of the system.
- Maybe a progressive, grass roots “infiltration” of the police is doomed to fail, I dunno. But I’m not sure we’ll ever find out.
  You not wanting to find out doesn't mean it hasn't been confirmed, over and over and over and over again.
  but is what we’re currently doing really working?
  No, that's literally why people who say ACAB also want to abolish the police.
  https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/officer-a-cab-confessions-of-a-former-bastard-cop
  https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anonymous-manifesto-for-the-abolition-of-the-police
  https://inthesetimes.com/article/police-and-poor-people
  https://web.archive.org/web/20220128000248/https://www.enainstitute.org/en/publication/mark-neocleous-capitalism-was-created-by-the-police-power-interview-at-ena-institute/
  
  want to abolish the police.
  That's stupid. Yeah, they're bastards, but some sort of police is needed. We aren't devolving into libertarianism where everyone hires private security.
  We just need to cripple police unions, restrict qualified immunity, make body cams mandatory, have a separate oversight body, and make cops carry individual insurance (so no tax dollars pay out lawsuits, and bad cops become uninsurable). The problem will fix itself in months.
- It's because the institution itself is corrupt. The cops are best thought of as a state-sponsored gang. What you're proposing is like saying "Maybe if enough progressives join street gangs, we can end gang violence!"
- I think another big issue is that cops are paid like shit. This immediately removes a lot of qualified people because for that effort you could make a lot more money somewhere else.
  The only candidates you are left with are those who truly care for the community, and those who get off controlling it.
  
  Entry level salary for cops in Seattle is over 100k
  
  Where did you get that info? Cops in LA NYC & Seattle (all places I've lived) have very high starting salaries, besides all the excellent benny's like double pay for anything over 4hrs OT work per day, zero dollar PPO insurance, etc..

Funny enough, a few months ago, I took a photo of the same poster.

You generally need a Master's degree to become a librarian.
- Less cops. More people with higher education.
  
  Wish it was free
  
  I need to go back to college, man
- Yes. The poster is encouraging people to do better.
- Lmao, you need a fucking masters to catalogue and check out books to local schoolchildren but you don't need it to be trusted with a badge and a gun.
  We're so fucked dude.
  Edit: Mentioned in reply to another comment, but sorry for making librarians sound like they don't do much. My point wasn't that they're not important, my point was that they don't make life or death decisions for random members of the community on the daily.
  
  You are dramatically underestimating the responsibilities and skill set of a librarian.
  
  Actually to be a school librarian you only need a bachelor's of education focusing in something IT-related, plus whatever teaching cert your state requires. And in public libraries, you also only need a bachelor's in information science to be a library tech, which is the one that stocks the shelves and checks out books to local schoolchildren. Only being a full librarian needs a Master's. That said, academic libraries won't even look at you if you have less than a Master's.
- Why master's? But you WILL need a degree. Bachelor in Library Science, alternatively Pedagogy or Philology.
  It may seem odd, but librarians are pre-internet search engine. You tell them "I want I don't know what, but something like that and that" and they point where to find such information.
  
  Librarians need to be trusted to do research to work in most private and academic libraries. So public libraries just follow the trend. Private librarians tend to focus on organizing databases, since they generally work with computer archives instead of books. Academic libraries do literature reviews, where they read large amounts of research on a subject and then summarize everything they've learned.
  Most librarians hop between these fields a few times, and it can be very jarring to adjust to each sytem.

Fewer cops, not less cops.
- Less pedants
  You can do better
- Yet you have no problem with "wanna?"

More help and less authoritarian violence!
- Fewer authoritarian violence.

So, you wanna be on the top Harassin' and shootin' all the kids on the block Incarcerate the youth of the next generation And you'll get the high-fives at the police station
- Thank you, I had to scroll way too far to find a Morning Glory reference.

bep?
- Better. Eattle.
  
  ool nurses.
  rarians.
  MTs.

So you be wanna be p? a cop?